Social networking sites and online virtual communities continue to grow in popularity. Social networking sites, such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, allow users to post and view messages and personal information and to communicate with groups of persons who have common backgrounds or who share common interests. The amount of personal information is controllable to an extent by the user, but basic information about individuals can be obtained fairly readily, based on membership in particular groups, for example. The profiles of users posted on these sites are generally expected to correspond more or less to actual persons. However, it is sometimes possible to create fictitious user profiles that allow one person to pose as another, a man as a woman or an adult as a child, for example.
Currently popular virtual communities include Second Life and various massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft and RuneScape. These games and communities allow participants to control on-screen avatars that can interact and speak, via typed messages in a speech bubble, for example, with the avatars of other players. Many of these communities have policies requiring participants to disclose their age, and the communities either deny access to minors or limit their access to certain features of the community. However, it can be difficult to ensure that participants are in fact the age they claim to be, especially in environments where people often endow their avatars with characteristics quite different than those of the players themselves.
The phrase “online community” will be used herein to describe both social networks such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.com and virtual worlds such as Second Life as well as similar online communities in which participants can interact with one another in an anonymous or semi-anonymous manner.
Online communities offer many benefits for their users. However, because they often attract minor children, they can also provide a tempting target for pedophiles and others seeking to communicate with minor children for inappropriate or illegal reasons. Pedophiles are a significant problem for online communities, and many online communities take measures to detect and/or prevent pedophiles from interacting with children. (The term “pedophile” is used herein as a catch-all description of adults seeking inappropriate and/or illegal contact or communication with children even if the communications are not sexual in nature or the person otherwise does not meet a clinical definition of a “pedophile.”) Some online communities employ teams of monitors who read ongoing dialog in the virtual community to look for inappropriate conversations. However, this is expensive and far from foolproof since individuals can become distracted or bored, or they may miss subtle clues that suggest an inappropriate conversation. Limited filtering may also be employed to stop the use of profanity or predetermined unacceptable words; however, this too is not a suitable tool for detecting inappropriate activities, especially those that may legally occur between consenting adults and which should not be entirely filtered from a community. It would therefore be desirable to provide an automated, computer-implemented system and apparatus for detecting events in an online community that suggest inappropriate activity so that the persons involved in such activity can be monitored and/or reported to the appropriate legal authorities.